


Under the Bridge

by shalako



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Implied/Referenced Suicide, Just read, M/M, Past Rape/Non-con, Past Underage, don't sweat it, mentions of Malcolm/Peter Pan, romance is only slightly there, so if that's not your thing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-10
Updated: 2015-02-10
Packaged: 2018-03-11 11:02:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,697
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3325121
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shalako/pseuds/shalako
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Non-magical AU. Archie is driving home one night when he sees a familiar figure standing by the edge of the bridge.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Under the Bridge

**Author's Note:**

> I don't own Once Upon a Time. Any characters you recognize belong to a soul far more fortunate than I.  
> Shoutout to my wee sister, who accepts late-night, previously-un-discussed works in her inbox without question and lets me know when shit gets superfluous. You rock, kiddo.

He has never eaten in the dining room, and so he doesn’t bother to eat there today. A filmographer would want him to, would appreciate the starkness of that room, the layer of dust on everything, the dark colors of the walls and floor and table. But he eats where he has always eaten, at the tall white kitchen counter, on a tall and skinny wooden chair. A thin man all wrapped in tailored pinstripes and pink silk shirts, in black ties and brand-new socks, because three days ago he hadn’t known his life would end today, and so things like new packs of socks hadn’t seemed bizarre.

There are black thoughts in his head. He’s thinking of things that never cross his mind, except on days like this. His fork flashes in the light and it catches his reflection and he imagines he can see the streaks of wildness in his face that his father always said weren’t there. Dad was just about as close to human wilderness as you could get, though he’d always insisted he was a noble adventurer and not a piece of trash. Despite his chivalry, he’d had no family by the time his son was born, and his dedication to his “ideals,” his insistence that his nobility was intrinsic, hadn’t stopped him from fucking a thirteen-year-old girl when she got too close to his trailer, hadn’t stopped him from fucking her again and again until the End Result popped out of her one night in November, premature and lighter than it should have been and squalling.

His jaw tightens and he scoops a bite up on his fork and swallows it, and he’s forgotten what he’s eating, though he made it himself not half an hour earlier. He soft-shoes off his seat and scrapes his food into the trash. He’ll take that out before he goes. He’ll wash the dishes, too -- in fact, he fills the sink with water right away, dips the plate beneath it, watches the food-scum melt away without the aid of soap. A bit of water laps against his fingers and his stomach drops. His eyes trace the splashes and the droplets and the ripples until the plate is dried and put away, and he’s not standing by the sink anymore.

His dishes are clean. His house is clean -- he’s never been anything if not a neat man, and so there wasn’t much to do in the first place but tidy stacks of books and put them on the shelves. The trash is taken out and everything that needs to be thrown away is: his toothbrush and toothpaste, his painkillers and sleeping pills, the books he picked up secretly so many years before that tell him how to heal. Everything that marks the house as his is gone, but it feels no emptier than it did before.

He kisses his palm before he shuts off the lights and leaves.

A blessing.

* * *

There’s a book of Russian short stories on the seat of Archie’s old Toyota -- empty cans of Pepsi, a Mad magazine, and a bottle of pills for his anxiety. The cushions are covered in duct tape to keep the rips in them from leaking stuffing everywhere. On the floor, stewing in a sticky soup of spilled soda and antifreeze, is a pile of CD cases, old and not-quite-new. David Bowie is prominent among them, and it’s his voice crackling on the radio, but he’s surrounded by other stranger things. The soundtrack to _Angela’s Ashes_ , the debut album (hip-hop electronica) of a fourteen-year-old British girl, an obscure folk-music band, and _Confessions_ by Usher. It is Archie’s solemn opinion that everyone should own a copy of _Confessions_ by Usher.

He drives down the road that will take him back to town after a very long day, and Bowie sings to him about the future, and Archie’s thinks about how he’s ever gonna pay the rent this month. Life is slow and money’s slower lately, and it seems like all the moments that he used to enjoy have turned into things that make his heart ache. No less poignant, he is sure, but he never thought the day would come when poetry turned sour for him, when the homeless men at the bus station couldn’t make him smile with their stories, when taking one of his friends shopping, buying him food and new clothes, wouldn’t make him feel good.

He visited Jefferson today, and picked up Grace when she asked him to, seven years old and happy, and he danced with her at her request, danced with her toes on top of his through the snow. And The Beatles were on the radio that Ruby brought, and the sun was bright but wintery, not hot at all, and in the middle of it all Archie had to stop and put Grace down and walk away, and he had hidden in an alleyway and cried with plumes of air puffing from his mouth into the sky.

Nothing went wrong today, Archie thinks, but the melancholy is still there, and how is he gonna pay the rent? He turns the problem around in his mind. It used to be that he could take a patient in -- or two, or three, or five -- each day, and no matter how things went he’d have the money every month, to pay his rent. He doesn’t know what’s wrong with life right now -- if people don’t wanna pay for therapy, or if he doesn’t want to listen to them talk -- but either way it seems that nothing’s working out the way it used to.

He drives along the road back into town and pictures Mr. Gold’s face, unsmiling and uncharmed as Archie tries to beg for one more week. As Archie makes excuses and explains, explains how no one at all’s been coming in to talk. But Mr. Gold is a businessman, and though he’s more striking than most landlords, though a part of Archie wants to be his friend, to know him and to draw his face in profile, he knows that this is one landlord who won’t be swayed, and Archie can see his face right now, the hardness in his eyes, the flat lack of caring, the quiet disgust at ---

The quiet disgust at ---

Archie brings the pickup to a halt and stares. It is nighttime, and it’s hard to see, but there’s someone standing on the bridge before him, someone thin and not-quite-tall, staring at the water.

Archie reaches over, switches David Bowie off, lets the motor die. When he pushes the truck door open, the night air attacks him instantly but he doesn’t balk. His shoes sink in the snow, coldness creeping up his calves, and he shuffles forward till the moonlight shines some clarity onto the Person on the Bridge’s face.

“Mr. Gold,” Archie says by way of greeting. He rubs his hands together, feels the friction of his gloves against each other, and when he slides into place right next to Mr. Gold, their shoulders touching, he notices that the smaller man isn’t wearing any gloves at all. Nor a scarf, nor particularly heavy clothes. But Mr. Gold isn’t shivering -- his hands, with their long tan fingers, are clasped against the wooden railing, and they must be freezing, but he stands perfectly still. There are snowflakes in his hair and on his shoulders, and it isn’t snowing anymore. Heaven knows how long he’s stood here, staring at the river below.

“Are you OK?” Archie asks. He sees Mr. Gold’s eyes flicker, hooded, grim, but the other man lowers his chin and doesn’t answer, only staring at the slushing water.

“It’s pretty, isn’t it?” says Archie, following his landlord’s gaze. There is worry in his heart, clenched in his chest, and he talks to relieve it -- for himself, and because maybe it’ll make Mr. Gold talk. “When the moonlight hits the ice down there -- it’s really pretty. Like a movie. I always thought wintertime was really pretty. All the snow and ice, and everything just … sparkles.”

He sneaks a glance, sees Mr. Gold’s gaze unbroken and unreadable upon the water.

“This bridge, I always thought I’d like to take some pictures of it,” Archie says. “I’m not a good photographer, but I can draw. I just can’t draw _bridges_ \-- people, sure, or even animals sometimes, but no buildings or cars or anything. They don’t usually have enough character, but I think this one does. It sort of seems to breathe sometimes, don’t you think?”

He reaches up, touches a faded carving of a heart in the beam above his head, and with his other hand he traces ancient words of hate from one teen to another, words that are half-covered by Mr. Gold’s cold fingers. Archie lets his hand rest there, side-by-side with Mr. Gold’s, and hopes some of his own warmth might seep through to the other man.

“My friends used to come out here when I was a kid, and drink whatever booze they could get from their dads,” Archie says. He feels more than sees the tiny twitch that Mr. Gold gives, like the cold is finally starting to affect him. “When we got a little older, we’d get high and make out with our girlfriends, since no one ever came up here. Some guys would make out with their boyfriends -- I remember there were rumors that they were gonna shut the bridge down, for being unsafe, and that made us all feel dangerous. And brave. We’d climb up on the rafters there --” He points up, trailing his finger through the sky, and sees Mr. Gold’s gaze jerk upward as well to follow it. “--and sometimes guys would do, you know, stupid stuff. We were teenagers -- we’d monkey around and hang from the beams and stuff. You know how kids are. Lucky none of us got hurt.”

What Archie really remembers is sitting by a fire under the bridge, listening to teenagers he didn’t know have fun above him, invisible. He used to hide from his parents out here, used to immerse himself in other people’s lives, imagine he was one of them. But these are thoughts of a different time, and Archie has better things to deal with right now. When he looks around again, Mr. Gold’s gaze is back on the water, his eyes dark, unfathomable, and Archie’s chest hitches tighter. His fingers slide a little, covering the other man’s bare skin with his glove.

“You ought to dress warmer,” Archie says. “You could catch a cold. Do you need a ride home? I didn’t see your car.” His eyes swivel around for it, in case he missed it, but there’s no vehicle in sight. “You walked here?” Archie asks, and this time he gets the tiniest of nods. “Come on,” he says, and he wraps an arm around Mr. Gold’s chest, pulling him away from the rails. The other man’s fingers tighten, grasping at the wood desperately for just a moment, and then he lets go and stumbles back to the ground, and Archie isn’t sure when Mr. Gold even took those three steps up onto the rails. He pulls him back, back across the drifts of snow, pulls him back until he isn’t pulling him anymore, until they’re just walking with Archie’s arm around Mr. Gold’s shoulders, and both their heads are down.

Archie yanks the passenger side door open and sweeps the debris of empty cans and books and magazines down to the floor. He helps Mr. Gold up -- he doesn’t want the smaller man to ruin his nice suit by climbing in alone -- and then he slams the door shut, pushes through the snow to his side and starts the car.

The pickup growls out of its slumber with a blast of warm air from the heater that blows right into Mr. Gold’s face. The man’s eyes widen and he comes to life as well, jerks back like he’s wakened from a dream. He brings his hands up to the air vents, his breath puffs out in a single surprised gasp, his shoulders and arms start to shake from the cold. David Bowie picks up the song where he left off and the overhead light of the truck, dim and ancient, creates an artificial sun.

Mr. Gold turns his head and stares at Archie nakedly. Archie stares back and shrugs.

“Where do you live?” he asks as he puts the car in drive. He eases it across the bridge; snow is thick here, and he doesn’t want to get stalled. He’s made it almost all the way across when he chances another glance at Mr. Gold, who is still just looking at him -- eyes wide, eyebrows peaked, lips just barely parted.

Archie raises his eyebrows and Mr. Gold, jerking back a little, lets out a shaky exhale.

“I’m in number 433,” he says, his voice as quiet as always, though not quite as cold or calm. “Clover Street.”

“433 Clover Street,” Archie repeats with a nod. “Well, let’s get the show on the road.”

The pickup disappears into the night.

* * *

 

He reaches the steps of his empty house that he was never supposed to come back to, and then he turns, his back straight in his pinstriped suit and his hair perfectly combed and his face unreadable and calm. He looks back, and sees Dr. Hopper standing not ten feet away in his driveway, leaning against the old pickup truck, one hand in his pocket for warmth and one still raised in a little wave, and then Mr. Gold bursts into tears. He’s blinded by it, blinded and choking, and all he can feel is the warmth of it on his face, warm and wet and stinging at his eyes, until Archie comes out of the blindness and wraps his arms around him.

Gold’s muscles are twitching, his eyes leaking, his sinuses blocked in an instant, and all he can do is lean into the hug while he sobs. He doesn’t know why he is crying, doesn’t know why he’s allowing a stranger -- no, this man is even worse, a _tenant_ \-- to comfort him. He isn’t the type of person who cries. Isn’t the type of person who allows himself to be hugged. But the night is cold … and Archie is warm, and anyway, he can’t stop crying now.

His face is buried in the front of Archie’s coat. His only coherent thought is that he doesn’t want to go inside. _Please, don’t make me go inside. I don’t want to go in there again. Not again._

“OK,” says Archie, and Gold stutters to a halt. He hadn’t realized he was speaking aloud. “OK, don’t worry, we’re not going in. We’re not going in.”

Gold’s breath shudders and then slows; when he pulls away from Archie, his head is down, his face hidden. He looks in the darkened windows of his house, tries to see himself beneath the dust and snow. There’s nothing there.

Archie’s hand lands on his shoulder, heavy, big. “You can stay with me tonight,” the other man says. “I mean, if you don’t have anyone else in mind.”

Gold doesn’t look at him for a moment; when he does, his eyes are dry but reddened, and he looks ready to fall over on the ground.

“OK,” he says.

* * *

 

Archie’s house is warm and toasty, and decorated with a vast array of flowery throw pillows and giant hand-knit blankets. It’s also light; all the lightbulbs pop to life with the flick of one switch, leaving both of them fully illuminated for the first time.

Archie turns to Mr. Gold, smiling. Then his eyes narrow in on something and his smile fades, but he doesn’t say anything yet, and Mr. Gold isn’t sure what he’s looking at. He shifts uncomfortably and looks away, hoping to find some sort of mirror that will show him what’s wrong.

“You can hang your coat up over here,” says Archie, opening a closet door. Mr. Gold shifts the coat off reluctantly, still shivering from the cold, but he’s not too worried. He can feel heat pushing in at him from the vents on the walls.

He likes Archie’s house. He hasn’t been in it at all since he started renting it out, but there’s something that appeals to him about the grandmother-style of decoration. It makes him feel nostalgic for something he’s never experienced. He’s aware of Archie leaving the room and Gold takes the opportunity to look around.

There are stuffed animals on all the empty chairs and a sort of casual dirtiness that makes it feel more like a home than Mr. Gold’s ever did. He’d always hated dirt when he was a kid, hated the bugs and maggots everywhere, the dog droppings on the floor, hidden in the bedsheets. And he’d done everything possible to keep his home from ever nearing that level of dirt, kept it shining at every moment.

Maybe he’d been missing the point.

Archie walks back into the room with his hands full -- a bag of frozen peas in one and a glass of water in the other. He hands the glass of water over first. Gold realizes his thirst with a sudden violence and tries his best to swallow the water down. His throat feels swollen and raw and there’s a mental block on him that’s making this doubly difficult. For a moment, his vision wavers and he’s on his knees back home, instead of on a couch in Archie’s house. He gags and tries desperately to keep from spitting out the water, covering his mouth, ducking his head.

“You okay?” Archie asks as Mr. Gold works past the urge to vomit.

“Yes,” he manages eventually. He keeps his hand over his mouth until he can fully wipe away the water that dribbled down his chin and sets the glass of water down, deciding that going thirsty is better than puking on the floor. Archie hands over the bag of peas.

“For your neck,” he says. Mr. Gold looks at him quizzically. “The bruises,” Archie elaborates, gesturing to his own neck. “They look pretty bad.”

Shit. Well, there’s nothing to do about it now. Mr. Gold pulls his collar down and presses the bag of peas against the bruises there. He catches Archie looking and glares until the other man looks away.

Mr. Gold had known, of course, about the fingerprint-like bruises on his arms and legs and hips -- had known about the scrapes and gashes up and down his back and had bandaged well the long cut in his side. But he’d forgotten all about his neck. It must look strange -- long and smooth and unbroken, a perfect ribbon of bruising.

“Are you hungry?” Archie asks. Mr. Gold silently shakes his head. “Because I have leftovers. It’s Thai food, from the place out by Granny’s, if you want it.”

“No, thank you,” Mr. Gold says. Archie sits down across from him, his broad face split by a smile.

“What about ice cream?” he asks. Mr. Gold’s eyes flicker up to him, narrow and annoyed but still red from crying.

“It’s winter,” Mr. Gold says. “Why would I want ice cream?”

“For the swelling,” Archie says, gesturing to his neck.

“And besides,” says Mr. Gold like he hasn’t heard, “I already told you I’m not hungry. I ate before I left.”

Archie waves away the protestations with a throaty “ _Ach_.”

“You’re too skinny anyway,” he says, standing up. “Come on into the kitchen. I’ll heat up the food.”

He leaves then, and after a moment’s hesitation, Mr. Gold follows him. He finds Archie digging in the fridge, pushing aside bottles of sparkling grape juice to get at some grease-stained take-out cartons in the back.

“I’m not too skinny,” says Mr. Gold as he takes a seat at the table. “I’m the exact amount of skinny that I am. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“Of course,” says Archie without patronization. He empties the cartons into a kitsch glass bowl, mixes rice with vegetables, pops the whole thing into the microwave. When he looks up, there’s a wary shyness in his eyes. It reminds Mr. Gold with a jolt of their usual relationship -- landlord and tenant. There’s an imbalance of power here, and he’s not sure how much the events of tonight have changed it.

Archie sets the food down in front of him, fetches the glass of water from the living room and fills it up again.

“Take your time,” he says when Mr. Gold doesn’t immediately dig in. He taps his fingers on the tabletop, stares into the distance until Mr. Gold finally picks up the fork. He stabs a potato that’s turned yellow with sauce, chews on it for an impossible length of time.

“What’s your first name?” Archie asks. Mr. Gold forces himself to swallow, chases it with a shaky gulp of water.

“Why?” he says. Archie smiles.

“So I can call you it.”

Mr. Gold snorts softly, pushes his food around the porcelain bowl. “It’s not a name I like to hear,” he says. “I’d prefer you just call me Gold.”

He phrases it almost like a request, but his tone makes it clear that this is really a command. Archie only nods; a part of him had rather expected the conversation to go this way. For a long minute, he sits and watches Gold eat, lost in contemplation over the sudden turn his life has taken. Mr. Gold doesn’t look at all like the man who cried, only minutes before, in Archie’s arms. But Archie supposes he doesn’t look at all like the man who cried in an alleyway earlier today, either.

“You can take the bedroom,” Archie says. “I have a guest room, but I never bothered to put a bed in there, so it’s my room or the couch.”

“I’ll take the bed,” Gold says unapologetically. He pushes the bowl away with its contents mostly untouched, and Archie pours the leftovers back into a Tupperware container. He’ll re-heat them a second time for dinner tomorrow. “Of course,” says Gold, “it’s almost morning, anyway.”

It _is_ morning, in fact. It’s nearly four a.m. Archie’s eyes dance over the cricket-shaped clock on his kitchen wall, but he doesn’t mention it.

“Any sleep is good sleep,” he says instead. “Come on, I’ll get you some pajama pants.”

And he leads Gold up the steps, farther away from the bridge.

* * *

On his knees, he is a boy again.

Beneath the bridge, he is a boy again.

And in one decade, you can hear the sound of flesh on flesh and a child crying, and in another, Archie Hopper, twelve years old, buries his face in his knees and hides from Mom and Dad. The riverwater swells up to lap against his toes just like it lapped against six-year-old Gold’s scabbed and dirty knees ten years before.

In one dream, dreamt in 1967, Gold is only Andrew, and he and Daddy drive across the bridge in Daddy’s ancient yellow Ford. And Andrew hears the concrete crack, hears water roar and wood splinter as the bridge crumbles beneath them and their car plummets with them in it to the river. In another dream, dreamt in 1981, Gold sits beneath the bridge to think when he hears voices from above. A woman’s voice, a child’s babbling. Milah and Bae. And when he looks up, he sees them in striped bathing suits, staring over the railing into the water. Gold wants to tell them not to dive, that the murky water hides a bed of sharp rocks and concrete blocks, but he can’t yell it out in time, and Milah jumps first, and Bae goes in next just as his mother’s brains and blood color the water red.

He only has that dream once but he remembers it forever, unlike the other one, constantly forgotten, constantly re-lived. At nighttime, Gold becomes Andrew, and he falls into the water with his father, trapped inside his father’s car. And seamlessly, that dream becomes the next, becomes a boy on his knees and a man on his feet and the sound of flesh on flesh.

* * *

 

When he was fourteen, Archie hid from his parents underneath the bridge, and half-buried in the mud, he found a peculiar thing. He couldn’t tell what it was until he plucked it up from the ground, and then he’d screamed and thrown it away. It was the skull of a pig, and his initials, A.H., were carved into its crown. Archie had curled into a tight ball there in the mud, had bitten his thumbnail so hard it tore off and blood dripped down his wrist onto his sleeve.

As an adult, Archie remembers these things only vaguely, a fleeting thought as he lays spare blankets on the couch and tries to make it into a comfortable bed. He never found out who left that skull there, but it hadn’t stopped him from hiding under the bridge. When he went there at night, he could close his eyes and listen to cars rumble by above him and crickets chirp around him, and with that noise filling his ears it was easy to pretend he wasn’t alone. He lays on the couch now and takes in a deep breath, tries to simulate the smell of nature, the sense of peace he felt back then.

He thinks this would be easier with the window open, but by now he’s too sleepy and relaxed to cross the room to it. Archie lets all thoughts of the bridge fall away.

He doesn’t have work tomorrow; no patients scheduled on a Sunday, no opportunity to make some extra cash. But technically, Archie supposes, Gold owes him now: for stopping him from jumping, for giving him a place to stay. That can probably buy him a month’s rent, if he plays his cards right. And if he can stomach the idea of using Gold’s vulnerability as leverage.

With an itching, restless brain, Archie falls asleep.

* * *

 

Gold doesn’t leave.

That’s what solves Archie’s rent problem, in the end -- not more patients, not a second job. His landlord moves in with him permanently. Gold doesn’t even ask if it's okay.

It takes Archie three days to realize exactly what’s happened. The first day, he wakes up and Gold is already gone, leaving Archie’s bedroom neater and cleaner than it’s ever been. On close examination, Archie finds that Gold even got rid of all the dog hair in the corners, and wonders if the other man bothered to sleep at all.

The second day, Gold lets himself in while Archie is at work. He makes dinner; Archie comes home to the smell of pasta and a cold, noncommittal greeting on Gold’s part. They don’t discuss the fact that Gold is here. They don’t discuss much at all.

The third day, Archie wakes up and Gold is sitting in his kitchen sipping fresh coffee. The shiny new coffeemaker on the counter isn’t Archie’s. It’s expensive and complicated, with rows of buttons Archie doesn’t comprehend.

“I hired someone to bring some things from my house,” Gold says tonelessly from the kitchen table. There's a shadow in his eyes that makes him look almost caged. “They’ll be over later today.”

“Oh,” Archie says. He pours himself a cup of coffee, using his favorite faded mug, an ancient thing with Snoopy and Woodstock making signs of victory. Archie is uncomfortably aware of Gold’s sharp eyes on his back, but the coffee is fragrant and rich and not too bitter, so he excuses the stare. Archie doesn’t have any sessions ‘till one o’clock; he plans to leave in an hour or so anyway, maybe go and visit the library, or hang out at the diner. Pongo will appreciate the walk.

“Are you opening the pawnshop today?” he asks Gold, who is cradling his own coffee mug in both hands, staring into the middle distance. Whatever he sees there, he seems unimpressed.

“I open it every day,” Gold says.

“Not Sunday,” Archie says.

“Even Sunday.”

Well, that’s a blatant lie. Archie decides to head out early -- anything is better than facing Gold’s strange, muted hostility. He whistles for Pongo and attaches a leash to his collar, leading him out of the room even as the dog jumps for Mr. Gold’s coffee.

“Down, boy,” Archie says. He tugs Pongo out the door with gentle firmness; the chilly winter air, fresh and crisp, and the haphazard sound of un-migratory birdsong lift his spirits incrementally.

He doesn’t hear Mr. Gold’s coffee mug shatter as it hits the floor.

* * *

 

Gold stands on the steps of his old pink house, sterile and large, and tries to force himself to touch the door. His arms won't move. His fingers barely twitch. And in the end, he thinks of all the neighbors, watching him with hawk-like eyes from behind their cheap curtains and dirty shades, and Gold turns his back on the Victorian.

He heads to Archie's house.

He's not sure he can leave.

* * *

 

They watch TV together sometimes, when the evenings seem long and hard to bear. There was a time when Archie counted himself a fan of far too many TV shows -- he has the box sets in a cabinet by his television set -- but with time, all enjoyment of those things had faded away. Even now, he can’t force his old excitement, but at least with Gold around -- Gold, who is a fan of nothing -- he finds himself happy to talk.

“And the character dynamic is brilliant,” Archie says, slipping a DVD into the player. He grasps the remote, fast-forwards through all the previews. Back on the couch, Gold is wincing and shifting his bad leg, trying to find a comfortable position. “It’s like, you don’t really appreciate them at first because you think they’re all just so unlikable, but as the season wears on, you learn more and more and you realize just how _human_ they all are, and everything they do is just so natural …”

He presses Play on the DVD menu.

“And the slow descent into basic immorality is, of course, fascinating,” he says. He arranges the pillows on the couch and plops down amongst them; his weight tilts the cushions so Gold nearly falls into his lap. “Sorry,” Archie says. “Anyway, there’s this part in season two -- I’m not gonna spoil it-- where one of the characters sort of has a breakdown over something, and you see what really makes her tick, and then of course there’s this amazing shift in character roles, where some of the villains become the heroes, and some of the heroes become the villains, and --”

“Archie,” says Gold, the first time he’s ever used Archie’s first name, “I can guarantee you I’m not going to watch past episode one.”

_Lies_ , Archie thinks. He presses Pause just as the opening theme starts so he can keep talking.

“That’s what I thought, too, when I first saw the commercial,” he says. “ _Oh, there’s no way I’m gonna watch it_. But then I did. I think it was because I saw the villain, and I thought he looked really cool, so I decided to give it a try. Anyway, it’s worth it, you’ll see.”

He raises the remote to press Play, then reconsiders and lets it drop back to his side.

“Do you want a synopsis of the plot?” Archie asks. “If you know what it’s about, you’ll probably want to see it more.”

“Nothing you could possibly say would make me want to watch a show called _Fables_ ,” Gold says, nose wrinkled. There are dark circles under his eyes, reminding Archie that Gold hasn’t been sleeping lately and that nine in the evening isn’t the best time to start marathoning a 24-episode show.

“I’ll make you a deal,” Archie says. “Watch the first episode. If you don’t like it, we won’t watch the next one. But if you do like it, or you’re even just neutral to it, we go on. OK?”

“None of that sounds desirable,” Gold says flatly. Archie tosses a pillow onto the floor near Gold’s foot, and after a moment Gold rests his ankle on it.

“In return for your potential viewing of the next episode,” Archie says, “I will massage your leg before it inevitably cramps and turns you into a sobbing ball of pain.”

Gold narrows his eyes in a poorly-concealed flinch.

“And if you _do_ watch episode two,” says Archie, “I’ll make that phone call to Dr. Whale that you’ve been dreading and get him to renew your sleeping pills.” He holds his hands out in an equanimous gesture. “Deal?”

“Deal,” Gold says. He shakes Archie’s hand, his skin dry and warm, fingers lingering for just a moment too long against the therapist’s palm. Archie feels an unexpected heat take over his neck and cheeks; he turns his gaze to the TV screen and tries to will the blush away. “Although I’m not sure you really needed to make a deal for this,” Gold says. “I’m just as bored as you are.”

Archie lets out a nervous chuckle and presses Play.

* * *

 

During the day, Archie and Mr. Gold are strangers to each other. They are the therapist and pawnbroker, and Gold stays secluded in his shop for hours, and Archie reminds himself that he has other friends than Gold, that he is friends with Ruby and Jefferson and Leroy even if none of them seem to sense his moods like Gold does.

Archie knows better than anyone that love, platonic or otherwise, is no cure for depression. And though he likes to pretend otherwise, he can see his own symptoms reflected back at him in Gold, can see how listlessness affects them both on different days, how the light in everything can sometimes fall away and leave every interesting moment lifeless and flat.

There are days when Archie stay in bed and Gold brings him coffee and leaves for work without him. And there are days when Gold gets up first as usual, and is immaculately dressed like always when Archie comes down for breakfast, but a reluctance bordering on terror takes over his face when the time comes -- and passes -- for Gold to leave the house and start his day.

Perhaps what makes them comfortable together is the lack of platitudes. Gold doesn’t try to pester Archie with words of recovery on his off-days; he does the dishes and the laundry and lets Archie wile time away on nothing. And when Gold’s off-days come and withdraws into himself, becomes the cold and distant man the whole town knows, Archie just turns on the TV and draws Gold into a mindless, poorly-written show.

It isn’t a solution. Archie used to believe in solutions, but that time has passed, and he knows that things don’t always work out better in the end than how they started. Illnesses don’t always get cured. Broken things don’t always mend.

In the TV shows he watches (watches with Gold, nowadays), Happy Endings are the end goal. Archie thinks about childhood and thinks about death and doesn’t imagine that either are pleasant, for most people in the world. It seems to him that endings are sad by nature. At the very least, they’re bittersweet.

Archie makes breakfast for Gold. Gold makes him a cup of coffee. When they pass each other a plate and a mug, respectively, their fingers touch. Neither of them pulls away.

Archie smiles, bright and wide. He gets an out-of-practice, shy little quirk of the lips in return. And when he leans forward, those lips are warm and soft, and he feels them twitching, pulling up into a smile to match his own.

Happy Endings are overrated. Archie will settle for Happy Moments along the way.

* * *

 

There are fleeting touches, long, sweet kisses, in the daytime.

In the nighttime, nightmares come.

* * *

 

“Down, boy,” says Daddy under the bridge. A boot to the stomach. Dried mud on his elbows and knees. “I said, _down_.”

* * *

 

Gold avoids the telephone like it might bite him. He’s not sure where the aversion comes from; possibly it’s an innate fear of technology, but he’ll never know. When he needs to phone someone, he puts it off as long as possible, and then he puts it off some more. He can’t remember how many times his electricity was shut off before, when he was still married, because he couldn’t convince himself to pick up the phone and make a call.

These days, Archie does it for him. He gets Dr. Whale to renew prescriptions Gold had canceled months ago. And he finds out other things Gold avoids, like the pharmacy and the grocery store, and goes there for him as well.

He asks Gold before he leaves to make a list of food he wants from the store. Archie’s departure is delayed considerably because of this; it takes Gold more than an hour of agonizing over the paper to create a list of five things. He hands it to Archie, who pockets it and gives him a goodbye kiss.

On the list, Gold asks for apples, flour, sugar, bread, and tomato soup. Generic things, things he knows that Archie could use in the kitchen. If this were Gold’s house, if he had control over things, there would be no food in the cupboards today, no dog hair on the floor, no trash in the bins. He would clean every last corner and bleach the tile for as long as it took to remove the years of dirt.

But this isn’t Gold’s house. He sits at the table in the dining room, and Pongo sits in a too-small dog bed in the corner, his long, spotted legs hanging over the  edge. And Gold can’t think of anything to do. Where Gold’s house was always cold and stagnant, Archie’s house is warm and full. It’s a home. Its walls creak in protest at the thought of work, the roof stretches in indignation that anyone beneath it would think of cleaning, of organizing, of setting things to rights. Of leaving. The floorboards here are too used to Gold’s uneven gait, and they won’t let him leave.

Gold stands from the dining room table and crosses to the kitchen, where a window looks out into the forest and an old boombox sits beside the sink. Archie listens to it when he does dishes and for the first time in three months, Gold takes the time to study the buttons and figure out how it works. He turns it on and switches it from radio to CD, presses play.

For a moment, over the sound of the radiator, all Gold can hear is a mild electronic whir. Then a faint digital number, 1, appears on the grey little screen, and Gold isn’t at all surprised to hear David Bowie fill the room.

He remembers this song; mournful and sad and redolent of the 70s, they listened to it in Archie’s car, that day on the bridge. Slow music fills the air; Gold stands with his fingertips on the edge of the counter and his back straight and he stares outside into the woods, listens once again to the drums with the boombox so close to him that this song is all he can hear. The noise is minimal. Just lyrics and percussion and the sound of Pongo’s gentle whine, and at some point, Gold reaches up into the cabinet to his right, and with unseeing eyes he takes the bottle of sleeping pills out of its white bag from the pharmacy and weighs it in his palm.

_What is it like_ , Gold wonders, _to know exactly how much time you have left?_

He fancies he can guess.

There are one hundred and fifty caplets in this little bottle of pills.

The music swells.

* * *

 

Archie buys him a teddy bear for Valentine's Day, a giant, sickly pink thing with a red heart in its paws. When Gold's head is swimming, it looks as though that heart can still pump blood. He sees it beat, can hear the steady rhythm. Then he realizes he's just drifting in and out of sleep with his ear on Archie's chest. Archie's heartbeat tries to be a lullaby for him, tries to chase Gold off to sleep. It never works; he lies awake and studies that garish teddy bear instead.

Archie snores beneath him. Gold shifts, trying in vain to find a position comfortable enough to make his brain shut off. On the dresser across the room, the teddy bear seems brighter than a camera flash. Gold's never had a teddy bear before, never really had any toys. Neither has Archie, he knows. Maybe he should've bought a bear for Archie on Valentine's Day, instead of buying him nothing at all.

Gold pictures himself lugging one of those awful stuffed animals down the street and snorts. He buries his face in Archie's chest, tries to relax.

Some nights he has the worst fucking ideas in the entire world.

* * *

 

_Happy Moments_ , Archie thinks as he listens to Gold retch, as he wipes unnaturally-colored vomit off the floor. He throws the towel in the washer, kicks an empty orange bottle ‘till it rolls under the bed and out of sight forever. _Happy Moments, not Happy Endings_.

He picks a glass up from where it fell on the floor and holds it just beneath the faucet, rinses it off. There’s not much to clean here; a moment before, the glass was full, but only with salt and water. Archie shakes the droplets off the glass and puts it in the strainer to dry. His lips start to tremble before he can step away from the counter; a dutiful part of him wants to go to Gold, to make sure he’s okay, but Archie can’t force himself to move. He raises a shaking hand to his face and wipes water from his eyes.

A shuddering breath.

A failed attempt at resolve.

_Ten more seconds_ , Archie tells himself. _Ten more seconds to cry, and then you have to go talk to him. You have to make sure he’s okay_.

But the cricket-shaped clock on the wall ticks past a minute, then two, and Archie still can’t move an inch. The sound of vomiting, soft to begin with, fades away, and Archie has a moment to worry that Gold has fainted before he hears the muffled sound of the other man’s feet on the floor, hears the toilet flush.

_Happy Moments_ , Archie chants, eyes sliding closed. _Not Happy Endings_.

* * *

 

Summer comes fast, and in May, three days ‘till June, Archie and Mr. Gold sit together on the back porch and listen as the crickets start to call. Their thighs touch ever-so-slightly, a warm and gentle reminder of each other’s presence, a warning not to fall into another world, another life. On a table in the kitchen, a newspaper proclaims that the bridge at the edge of town will be destroyed in July, replaced in August.

“I always loved the sound of crickets,” Archie says. He stretches and leans back on the wooden slats of his porch, gazes up at the stars instead of out at the trees. After a long moment, Gold joins him. His fingers graze Archie’s arm; the long strands of his hair tickle Archie’s neck. “It’s peaceful,” Archie says. “Idyllic. I used to listen to them chirp when I was a kid and it always made me feel better.”

Gold gives a toneless hum. The wine from dinner has set his brain into a pleasant buzz, making the edges of the world seem blurry. That isn’t the only factor, of course. He’s been thinking too much lately of the past and of the future. Had too many thoughts of different times stuck in his mind. He needs the present, needs the happy little moments he can find in the here and now.

His head tilts until it’s almost resting on Archie’s shoulder, and Gold watches the stars. Last week, Dr. Whale renewed his prescription, but Gold didn’t pick it up. He’s found a form of self-hypnosis in Archie’s touch, and today Gold’s stomach isn’t full of sleeping pills but he can almost feel them dissolving anyway, entering his bloodstream, shutting off his lungs and heart and brain without any of the urgent panic, any of the stress and pain and fear he felt before. The past and future are eaten up. All that’s left is now. The happy moments.

“You know, I’m glad I found you that day in winter,” Archie says. “You remember? By the bridge? I don’t think you know how depressed I’d been that month.”

Their fingers are touching. It would take only one small movement for Gold to hold Archie’s hand, but as he looks up at the stars he finds his muscles far too heavy to move. And he’s content with that; in fifty years, Gold has neither sought nor given comfort. And he refuses to start right now, when he’s taken so much and given so little. It would feel too much like a lie.

“You really helped me,” Archie says. “Moving in, being my friend. Even if you are a little strange about it. I just felt so …”

_Alone_ , Gold thinks. _Afraid_. He knows those feelings all too well; today they’re muted, but he can still feel them churning around in the growing darkness of his brain. They come out in his nightmares, in the dreams of Daddy’s car and Bae and Milah jumping off the bridge.

Gold hasn’t slept in nearly twenty years because of nightmares. And neither sleeping pills nor overdoses ever helped. But today he’s warm and he’s lying next to Archie in the summer heat, and he feels his eyelids sliding closed.

“Anyway,” Archie says, his pinky finger touching Gold’s, “I’m glad for this. For knowing you.” His palm slips over Gold’s hand, warm and encompassing. “I think we helped each other, don’t you think?”

The stars blink out.

The crickets fall away.

“Gold?” Archie says, voice gentle, soft. “Are you awake?”

The bridge collapses.

“Gold?”

He sleeps.


End file.
